The Right to Housing, Discrimination, and the Roma in Slovakia

The Right to Housing, Discrimination, and the Roma in Slovakia

Abstract

Human Rights Law Review 5:2 ß The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org doi:10.1093/hrlr/ngi019 ............................................................................... Sarah Joseph* L.R. et al v Slovak Republic (31/03)1 concerned a complaint under the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination 1966 (CERD) by a number of Roma people regarding the actions of a local council in the Slovak Republic. The factual background to ¤ the complaint was as follows. 1800 Roma lived in the district of Dobsíina in appalling conditions. On 20 March 2002, the local council adopted by way of Resolution ‘a plan to construct low-cost housing for the Roma inhabitants ¤ of the town’.2 In response, 2700 inhabitants of Dobsíina presented a petition opposing the Resolution, claiming that implementation of the housing plan would ‘lead to an influx of inadaptable citizens of Gypsy origin from the surrounding villages, even from other districts and regions’.3 In August 2002, the Council unanimously voted to revoke the earlier Resolution by way of a second Resolution, which referred to the petition.4 The Resolution, however, did not explicitly refer to the Roma. Rather, it referred to ‘inadaptable citizens’. The ‘petitioners’ (that is,